Uriah Heep. Uriah Heep, an ugly name for an ugly person. One of the meanest villains ever created by Charles Dickens. He is David Copperfield’s nemesis in the story of “David Copperfield.” He presents himself to the public, all the time, as a very humble man. “I’m just a very ‘umble man.” And he is very humble man, and very proud of his humility. And, underneath that humble façade is roiling anger, and jealousy, and envy, and hatred. It all eventually spills over and threatens the characters in the story.
I tell you that because today’s gospel is about humility, and humility is not a very popular attitude or virtue in today’s society. Think of the way people behave on Facebook and other platforms; counting the number of likes they get, always having to have the last word. Watch the TV news when people are being interviewed at the site of some problem, or disaster, or tragedy. No one seems to have an inside voice anymore. Everything is at the top of people’s lungs. We are an angry and self-first population. When we are like that, it’s hard for us to hear anything about humility because we see it the same way Charles Dickens created this caricature of humility, something really not to be admired, but rather despised.
During the 1950s, the first big decade of television programming, there were two quiz shows with fairly similar themes. One was called “What’s My Line?” The other was called “I’ve Got a Secret.” On “What’s My Line?” people would appear on the show and the panel of celebrity contestants would have to guess what the person does for a living. Now, since they often had famous people come on the show, they sometimes had to blindfold the contestants so that they would not see the person. Sometimes the person would have to disguise his or her voice because their voice was so familiar that just listening would cause the panel to figure out almost right away who the person was. On “I’ve Got a Secret,” people came on the show and they may have been famous for something else, but they came because they had a special hobby, or secret talent, or maybe they were related by blood or marriage to a famous American of a century ago; something else that no one would guess about them and the panel had to figure out what that secret was.
Every now and then, you see an article in the celebrity magazines about the children of stars. To be the child of a famous person can be very challenging. When children are very little, they don’t know what their parents do for a living, really, and their parents, no matter how famous they are, are just “Daddy” and “Mommy”. But after they begin to become more aware of the world around them and find out that their parent is a famous sports figure or famous movie star or something else like that, they are conflicted about their relationship with their parents. Maybe they get teased in school about their parent, or maybe they get glamorized in school by classmates who want to be near somebody who’s near somebody who’s famous. But either way, it becomes a hassle for them. If they grow up successfully, sometime in young adulthood they resolve the conflict, but it’s very difficult sometimes to be near the famous.
In the Broadway musical “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the scene we just heard in today’s gospel is done very cleverly. All of the chorus begins to sing the words “What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening. What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening.” As though Jesus simply wanted to know about the latest gossip concerning Him.
I was ordained to the diaconate in May of 1968, one year to go before being ordained a priest. And right after ordination, I went home for the summer with my parents, and the pastor of my parish invited me to preach at the 9:00 Mass on Sunday morning, which was the children’s Mass. However, it was a big urban parish, and what they did was the children would sit in the front in the middle with the religious sisters to control them, and their parents would sit on both side aisles and in back of the children. Unfortunately, that weekend, the country was in the midst of a great grief. Bobby Kennedy had just been shot. If you remember the political context of that time, the antiwar movement was growing rapidly. Lyndon Johnson had entered the presidency after another great tragedy, the assassination of John Kennedy. And he made a great deal of his presidency because he was very forward-looking, and he is the one responsible for the theme called “The Great Society,” which was the first great turning point in race relations in the twentieth century. The work he did in civil rights and social justice legislation was really remarkable, coming from a Southern democrat. But the escalating war in Vietnam finally did him in, and he announced that he was not going to run for a second term, which meant that the presumptive candidate should’ve been Hubert Humphrey. A great number of people in the Democratic Party were fearful that, if Hubert Humphrey ran, then Richard Nixon would beat him. And the younger people were demanding something more radical to deal with the war. And so, there was a movement to have Bobby Kennedy challenge Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic nomination. And then he was killed.
So here I am in the North Bronx, which is a parish full of conservative banter, including my father and mother, and even myself. Many of them have a distinct dislike for poor Bobby Kennedy. And I have got to preach to a room full of children, from kindergarten to eighth grade, and try to explain to them what the national tragedy is, and what the Catholic response should be to tragedy without, at the same time, alienating or angering their parents. So it was a really challenging first homily. The very next weekend, all of the members of my class were sent to preach for the propagation of the faith all over the archdiocese, and I had to take the train from Grand Central up to Poughkeepsie. And I was housed overnight in a parishioner’s home, and I preached for the propagation of the faith at thirteen Masses. And I have never preached for the propagation since. So today, after fifty-three years, I’m going to do it again.